Under the stimulus to my imagination given by this gentleman’s character, the desire, which from a boy I had more or less nourished, of becoming a teacher of Christianity to the heathen, took stronger and stronger hold of me.  I saw that I was shut out from the ministry of the Church of England, and knew not how to seek connexion with Dissenters.  I had met one eminent Quaker, but was offended by the violent and obviously false interpretations by which he tried to get rid of the two Sacraments; and I thought there was affectation involved in the forms which the doctrine of the Spirit took with him.  Besides, I had not been prepossessed by those Dissenters whom I had heard speak at the Bible Society.  I remember that one of them talked in pompous measured tones of voice, and with much stereotyped phraseology, about “the Bible only, the religion of Protestants:”  altogether, it did not seem to me that there was at all so much of nature and simple truth in them as in Church clergymen.  I also had a vague, but strong idea, that all Dissenting churches assumed some special, narrow, and sectarian basis.  The question indeed arose:  “Was I at liberty to preach to the heathen without ordination?” but I with extreme ease answered in the affirmative.  To teach a Church, of course needs the sanction of the church:  no man can assume pastoral rights without assent from other parties:  but to speak to those without, is obviously a natural right, with which the Church can have nothing to do.  And herewith all the precedents of the New Testament so obviously agreed, that I had not a moment’s disquiet on this head.

At the same time, when asked by one to whom I communicated my feelings, “whether I felt that I had a call to preach to the heathen,” I replied:  I had not the least consciousness of it, and knew not what was meant by such language.  All that I knew was, that I was willing and anxious to do anything in my power either to teach, or to help others in teaching, if only I could find out the way.  That after eighteen hundred years no farther progress should have been made towards the universal spread of Christianity, appeared a scandalous reproach on Christendom.  Is it not, perhaps, because those who are in Church office cannot go, and the mass of the laity think it no business of theirs?  If a persecution fell on England, and thousands were driven into exile, and, like those who were scattered in Stephen’s persecution, “went everywhere preaching the word,”—­might not this be the conversion of the world, as indeed that began the conversion of the Gentiles?  But the laity leave all to the clergy, and the clergy have more than enough to do.